How do you keep a cool head, a warm heart, and a steady presence?

As a manager, you face the daily challenge of providing direction, making decisions, and inspiring your team—often under high pressure and in a rapidly changing environment. Under pressure, the brain loses access to information processing, empathy, self-reflection, and the ability to innovate. How can you quickly bring these capacities back ‘online’? This is where your presence makes the difference: not just with your mind, but also through your posture and attention.

In this workshop, you will learn practical, physical techniques to directly influence your own state of being. You’ll discover how to center yourself under pressure, so you can keep thinking clearly, respond with empathy, and act decisively. With insights and exercises from Leadership Embodiment—drawing on Aikido, mindfulness, top sports, and neurobiology—you’ll gain awareness of your automatic reaction patterns and learn how to shift them towards greater strength, connection, and focus.

This way, even in difficult conversations, when facing resistance or criticism, you’ll remain relaxed and communicate effectively. You’ll receive immediately applicable tools to work as a leader with more calm, resilience, and impact on what truly matters to you and your organization.

What will you take home?

• Understand what happens in your brain under pressure and how to positively influence yourself.
• More calm, focus, and resilience in challenging situations.
• Insight into your automatic reaction patterns, their strengths and pitfalls, and how to adjust them.
• More effective and human communication, even when facing resistance or criticism.
• Tools to remain powerful and connected as a leader, especially when things get tough.

Anouk Brack
Anouk Brack, MSc in Biology, is an international leadership expert and lead trainer of Leadership Embodiment in Europe. She worked for 15 years at Wageningen University, specializing in sustainable leadership.

She has distilled her 25 years of experience as a trainer and (executive) coach into three books:

• The Hidden Dimension of Leadership – with techniques to optimize the collaboration between body and brain
• Leadership in Change – doing what matters together: full of tips for less hassle and more collaboration based on purpose in organizations
• The Daily Focus Planner – 3 x 5-minute routines for more focus, flow, and fulfillment in your workday

Anouk brings clarity, calm, and practical solutions—with a sense of humor.